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Poisonous Fillings

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25/05/1840

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Monsieur J.M. Mallan, a surgeon-dentist from London's Ludgate Hill, 'begs to inform the nobility, gentry and inhabitants of this town and their vicinities that he may be consulted on Mondays at Mrs Swift's, Market Place'. He offers the following:
"...to fill the cavities of decayed teeth, however large, with Mineral Saccedaneum, the great advantage of which is that it is placed in the tooth in an almost liquid state, without heat or pressure, and immediately hardens into an enamel which by a recent improvement will not discolour. it allays pain, arrests further progress of decay, thus preventing the necessity of extraction. By this means, a mere shell is converted into a sound and useful tooth, and the unpleasant taint of the breath arising from it entirely removed."
What he doesn't say is that 'Mineral Saccedaneum' is almost pure mercury and is most definitely not a nice thing to have in your mouth! (Lincoln, Rutland and Stamford Mercury)
Taken from The Peterborough Book of Days by Brian Jones, The History Press, 2014.

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Old Scarlett

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1594

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‘Old Scarlett’ was Robert Scarlett, parish sexton and gravedigger throughout the Tudor period. He lived to the prodigious age of 98, dying in 1594, married twice and buried Katharine of Aragon and Mary, Queen of Scots inside the Cathedral.

Amongst the hundreds of people that Scarlett buried during his lifetime was one ‘Edward the Foole’, a native of Crowland by birth and former court jester to King Henry VIII, laid to rest here in 1563. As was common practice at the time, and to allow for more burials in an already packed graveyard, the skeleton would have been exhumed some years later and the bones reburied in stacks. The image of an elderly gravedigger exhuming a royal jester’s skull might have stuck in the head of a Peterborough schoolboy, John Fletcher, the son of the then Cathedral Dean. Fletcher went on to become a noted Elizabethan playwright and worked with Shakespeare, even co-writing three plays with him, including the aforementioned ‘Henry VIII’. Is it possible that Fletcher may have suggested this scene to Shakespeare? Unfortunately ‘Hamlet’ was written between 1599 and 1601, and we have no evidence that the two men met until at least five years later, but it’s a tantalising thought nonetheless!